A Conversation with A. G. Sulzberger, the New Leader of the New York Times

While the Times has settled its succession plan and has made concrete gains in both strategy and revenue recently, there is no shortage of lingering anxiety at the headquarters on Eighth Avenue.

Photograph by Todd Heisler / NYT / Redux

In 2009, a byline began appearing in the Times that carried with it
the harbinger of dynastic transition. A new general-assignment reporter
named A. G. Sulzberger was banging around the city, writing about a
Third Avenue flop
house upstairs
from J. G. Melon, a high-end burger joint; about the maiden voyage of the U.S.S. New
York, a ship
fashioned in part from the wreckage of the World Trade Center; and about
the fading popularity of the “humble tool” known as the Pooper
Scooper.
Not long after, the very same Sulzberger was based in Kansas City, where
he described the experience of being a vegetarian in a city known as a “Mecca of
meat.” At Arthur Bryant’s famous barbecue place, he rejected the brisket
and the “lard-bathed French fries” and drank a Bud for lunch. Despite
the grandeur of the byline, carnivorous readers could not help but feel
sympathy for their self-denying correspondent.

A. G. Sulzberger’s apprenticeship is now at an end. On New Year’s Day,
he will become the publisher of The New York Times, occupying the
position that his father, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., who is sixty-six,
assumed after the retirement of his father, Arthur Ochs (Punch)
Sulzberger. A. G., who also goes by Arthur, is thirty-seven. He is the
sixth member of the Ochs-Sulzberger family to lead the paper. Earlier
this week, he came by our offices for an interview on The New Yorker
Radio Hour. He seemed earnest, serious, disciplined, even a bit nervous.
This surely had less to do with the fact that this was his first
interview as publisher than it was about the challenges at hand. The
institution that he now leads is almost certainly the most influential
media property in the country—and, arguably, the most important civic
institution in private hands. He comes into this inheritance while
revenues from print advertising plummet, Google and Facebook consume
more than three-quarters of the digital-ad market, and the President of
the United States feels free to smear his home-town paper as the
“failing” New York Times.

And yet this is an optimistic moment for a family that bought the paper
in 1896 but, despite its commitment to the future, seemed in recent
years to be losing its hold. Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the outgoing
publisher—he will remain as chairman—has taken a lot of criticism, not
least for making some costly deals. When the accelerating digital
revolution intersected with the financial implosion of 2008, there was
more and more talk that the Sulzberger family might have to sell control
of the Times to a far wealthier investor, such as Michael Bloomberg.
This was alarming. Bloomberg, who constantly complained about the way he
was covered in the paper as mayor, had ill-concealed contempt for the
Times. (I’ve heard it direct.) If Bloomberg had bought the Times,
there was no guarantee that he would have run it with the same
commitment to journalistic depth and daring. The Times under
Ochs-Sulzberger ownership has made mistakes over the decades, serious
ones, but its principles and sense of ambition—its commitment to publish
“without fear or favor”—remain benchmarks in the news business.

For all the low and painful moments in his tenure (including the firing
of two executive editors, Howell Raines and Jill Abramson), Arthur
Sulzberger, Jr., achieved serious things. Above all, he managed to
sustain, and even deepen, the quality of the paper’s journalism while
deciding on the right financial path for a vital future—an emphasis on
digital subscriptions sold at a high price to a national, and even an
international, audience. And so even while ad revenues are dropping
precipitously, the Times’ subscription picture is brightening. The
Times now has 3.5 million subscribers—2.5 million of them
digital-only. Meanwhile, the paper this year continued to publish
remarkable reporting, including Maggie Haberman and Peter Baker on the
Trump White House, and Jodi Kantor, Megan Twohey, Susan Chira, Emily
Steel, Michael Schmidt, and others on sexual harassment in the United States.

A few years ago, A. G. Sulzberger led a study that became known as the Innovation Report, a self-critical hundred-page-long exploration of
newsroom culture and the future that helped set the paper’s current
digital direction.

The paper’s promising situation is at odds with what happened at the
Wall Street Journal, in 2007, when the Bancroft family, a far more
fractured and less journalistically committed clan than the Sulzbergers,
gave up on the paper and sold it to Rupert Murdoch for five billion
dollars (a gaudily inflated price). And it’s different from what
happened at the Washington Post. The Post’s chief proprietor, Donald
Graham, was deeply committed to the paper, but, in the end, he and his
family could not find a feasible way out of decline. Graham’s last great
service to the Post, no matter how personally painful it might have
been to carry out, was, in 2013, to find a buyer in Jeff Bezos, the
founder and chairman of Amazon. So far, Bezos, who is worth nearly a
hundred billion dollars, has poured money into the paper, demanded
deeper digital innovation, and left the journalism to the editors, led
by Martin Baron.

Sulzberger grew up in New York and went to the Fieldston School. His
mother is Gail Gregg, a writer and painter; in 2008, his parents
announced they were divorcing. He graduated from Brown, in 2003, with a
degree in political science and worked at the Providence Journal and
the Oregonian before coming to the Times.

Jill Abramson, who helped bring Sulzberger along as a young reporter and
editor at the Times, told me that he was initially quite anxious about
coming to the paper. “He was nervous that people would think it was
nepotism,” she said. “But he was a terrific reporter and writer. I
genuinely would have hired him if he’d had a different last name.”
Sulzberger studied the paper with unusual attention. “Early on, I
remember I met him for breakfast, and he read the Times more carefully
than I did,” Abramson said. “That made an impression on me. He recited
the first paragraph of a story by Monica Davey, out of Chicago. He was
clearly studying up on everything.”

Sulzberger competed in a kind of bake-off for the top spot at the paper
against two of his cousins, Sam Dolnick and David Perpich. All three are
said to command respect at the Times, but the combination of
Sulzberger’s work on the Innovation Report, his journalistic experience,
and, yes, the fact that his father was first among equals in the family,
helped settle matters. The three cousins are said to maintain a good
familial and professional relationship. Dolnick is a masthead-level
editor who works on digital initiatives, including podcasts, and Perpich
is an executive at the paper and runs the Wirecutter, a gadget-review
site, which the Times bought last year.

But even while the Times has settled its succession plan and has made
concrete gains in both strategy and revenue recently, there is no
shortage of lingering anxiety at the headquarters on Eighth Avenue.
Sulzberger recently promised that there would be no cuts to the news
budget for the next two years, but ad revenues continue to drop, the
Trump Administration continues to lash out at the purveyors of “fake
news,” the newsroom staff is squeezing into fewer floors, and the media
business, in general, is not exactly a warm bath of stability. Our
interview with A. G. Sulzberger, which was edited for space and clarity,
transcribed by Hannah Wilentz, and produced for the Radio Hour by
Mythili Rao, began with notes of both congratulation and trepidation.

David Remnick: I should begin by congratulating you on getting what
seems like one of the hardest jobs imaginable. Do you feel like you
should be congratulated, or do you feel like you should be given a cool
glass of water?

A. G. Sulzberger: Well, thank you. It’s definitely an honor and a
privilege—and a daunting one. Maybe the best note I got from a
colleague was, “Congratulations/Sorry!” Which I think is probably a
statement of the pretty profound challenges facing journalism in this
moment.

D.R.: At the Washington Post, Donald Graham was the publisher, and he
was essentially raised to be the publisher. He worked as a policeman in
Washington, D.C., to get to know the city; he was a sports editor; he
had all kinds of jobs that were, in a sense, training him for this
future. Did you always know, as a kid, that this was the likely future
for you?

A.G.S.: I’ve always had a theory that decent journalists are contrarians
by nature, because they have to ask tough questions of people. They have
to ask tough questions of people, and assume people are lying to them,
and wake up in the middle of the night wondering if they got something
wrong. And, like any decent journalist, I have a contrarian streak, and
I actually spent most of my life not thinking I would go into
journalism.

D.R.: But you grew up with the Sulzberger family and the New York
Times. How could you picture yourself outside of it? Was that really
open to you?

A.G.S.: My parents and the broader Sulzberger family have always
encouraged people to chart their own course. For me, it changed in
college. I was always a little frustrated with academia and the sort of
indirectness of it. In my senior year, I took a class with a professor
who was a full-time investigative reporter at the Providence Journal.
Her name is Tracy Breton. She won a Pulitzer Prize for the Journal, a
great investigative reporter. And I found I just loved that type of
writing.

D.R.: So you got the bug from her?

A.G.S.: I ended up doing two classes with her. At the end of it, we had
this moment that I’ll never forget. The conversation basically went like
this: “Arthur, I’ve got a job for you at the Providence Journal. It’s
a two-year internship, and I’d really like you to do it. You’ll be
covering a small town in southern Rhode Island, a town called
Narragansett.” And I said, “Tracy, I’ve always been a little ambivalent
about following such a predictable route. I think I’m going to start my
career trying some other things.” And she looked and me and she said,
“Arthur, you know, I can just tell, from working with you, that you’re
going to love this, and I think, if you don’t try it, you’ll always
wonder. And, if you try it and you don’t love it, then you’ll do
something else.” And, you know, the first three months on any new beat
are terrifying.

D.R.: What was your beat?

A.G.S.: Narragansett is one of the largest fishing communities in the
Northeast. But it’s also become a sort of vacation destination, second
homes. I was a town reporter—I covered town-council meetings, I covered
school-board meetings. Every morning, I’d call the police chief to ask
what happened overnight. And I’d do the slice-of-life stories that any
small-town reporter does.

The first three months were tough, because the job of the reporter is
to explain something to everyone else. But, whenever you start a new
beat, you’re keenly aware of how much you don’t know. So for the first
three months, I wondered, Is this for me? After about six months, I
said, Is there any better way that you could spend—

D.R.: You were addicted. Why did you get addicted?

A.G.S.: Well, for me, it wasn’t a specific story; it was just that
beautiful combination of spending half your day learning and half your
day teaching. Half your day talking to people, finding out what’s going
on in the world, half your day alone pulling a story out of yourself. I
just loved the rhythm of the days. So I worked there, I worked at the
Oregonian, eventually joined the Metro desk at the Times. And then I
covered the Great Plains as the Times Kansas City Bureau Chief. And
then for the last few years switched to editing and then digital
strategy. That work has brought me in much closer contact with the big
business questions facing the Times, and all newspapers.

D.R.: Let’s get into that a little bit. Because these are existential
questions for the news business, for the New York Times, and frankly
for the family ownership of the New York Times. And, unless I’ve got
this wrong, the great dilemma is that print advertising has, if not
cratered, than certainly declined much more rapidly than anybody had
thought possible, or had hoped. And that’s a trend that’s not likely to
reverse. When it comes to online advertising, there's the phenomenon of
what we call pennies for dollars. You can’t really make a business of it
completely from online advertising.

D.R.: So, the only way, it seems to me, for the New York Times, or
for, quite frankly, The New Yorker, and a number of other publications
to go forward and have a healthy newsgathering business, and business in
general, is to go to the reader and say, “We hope you like what we do,
and we have to charge you a great deal more for it than in 1985 or
1995.”

A.G.S.: Yeah, I mean, so, let’s start from the advertising side of the
business. I actually think it’s more difficult and complex than you’re
letting on. The other great factor here is that almost all the growth in
digital advertising is going to two companies—Google and Facebook. The
rest of media is battling over the remainders. There’s some evidence
that that pie may actually shrink. Which is why you’ve seen businesses
that rely exclusively on advertising under such pressure. We saw that
first with newspapers and magazines, because print dollars started
disappearing first. But increasingly we’ve been seeing it with digital
publications—you’ve just seen news about places like Mashable or
BuzzFeed struggling to meet revenue projections, or selling low. The
entire ad ecosystem is becoming very, very difficult for news
organizations, particularly news organizations that do the expensive
work of original reporting. So the model that we shifted to about three
years ago was to declare ourselves “subscription first.” Which basically
means that, today, the vast majority of our revenue comes directly from
our readers.

D.R.: So at the peak of the advertising era, what percentage of the
revenue of the New York Times came from advertisements, and what is it
now?

A.G.S.: I believe it was around eighty per cent. And what’s remarkable
is that that’s relatively low for many print publications, which would
get as much as ninety-five per cent of their revenue from ads. Now the
majority is through subscribers. So now we’re about two-thirds
subscribers.

D.R.: And probably rising.

A.G.S.: And rising every day.

D.R.: And your subscription numbers are exploding. You’ve got 2.5
million subscribers who are digital-only and 3.5 million over all.

A.G.S.: Which is more than any American newspaper had at the peak of
print.

One thing I’d say about the subscription model that we didn’t expect,
which was an unintended benefit of this strategic shift we made, is that
everyone in the New York Times today wakes up thinking how can we
serve our readers. That’s aligned our journalistic mission and all of
our business incentives in a really clean and consistent way.

D.R.: How is that different from the past?

A.G.S.: Well, in the past, you’re aware of the old notion of the old
wall between the news and the business side. And the big reason that the
wall existed was that advertising was serving a different master than
news. The folks in the newsroom [thought], “How can we put out the
best journalism that meets the needs and interests of our readers every
day?” And then on the advertising [side], it was, “How can we get a
bunch of rich and powerful corporations to buy a bunch of ads?” There’s
an inherent tension there, which is why all these very important rules
exist about ad acceptability and insuring that advertising and newsroom
aren’t interacting and it wasn’t skewing the report inadvertently. Which
organizations like The New Yorker, the New York Times pride themselves on.

D.R.: Does that mean the wall’s gone? Does that mean that the business
side and reporters and editors can both physically and metaphorically
waltz into each other’s offices? Is there any separation at all left?

A.G.S.: So, to me, what matters is protecting against conflicts of
interest. I just gave a speech to my colleagues, in which I said two
things. I said, “We are one company, with a shared mission and a shared
strategy, but we are also one company that knows that the independence
and integrity of our journalism always comes first.” So, to me, the most
important thing is to have real strong protections around the editorial
independence of our newsroom. But even the notion of news and the
business sides––these are catch-all phrases that sort of miss the point.
Four years ago, when I started thinking about how the Times had to
evolve in order to keep pace with this fast-changing world, one of the
things that really struck me was that we regarded the members of our
technology team and product team as being on the business side. So, you
had this really unhelpful construct in which the folks who were building
our Web site weren’t able to talk to the people who were filling the Web
site with great journalism each day. So we’ve tried to move away from
the construct of “a wall” and toward a more nuanced understanding of
how, in a fast-changing digital environment, does this company need to
work together to get where we need to go.

D.R.: It seems to me that your apprenticeship was not merely as a
reporter in various bureaus. Maybe the most important phase of that
apprenticeship was working on something that become known as the Innovation Report. Tell me a little about that.

A.G.S.: I’d been an editor on Metro for a couple years and I was looking
for a new challenge. Jill Abramson, who was then the editor of the
Times, approached me and said she wanted me to lead a small group that
would be charged with coming up with a new product idea. And her belief,
which is something I really agree with, is that the newsroom should be a
hub of innovation. So I pulled together a team—smart people from around
the newsroom, people who had taken very different paths and journeys to
get where they were—and we started brainstorming. It pointed me to a
clear spot: the New York Times wasn’t lacking for good ideas about new
products. What it was lacking was a full embrace that we were becoming a
digital-media company. This would force us to break a lot of habits that
we had built for print and to really re-think a lot of what we were
doing.

D.R.: In other words, it’s campaigning for cultural change.

A.G.S.: Yeah, so I wrote a hundred-page memo, printed eight copies, very
discreetly delivered them to a small number of newsroom leaders. And you
can only imagine my surprise when, several weeks later, it was printed
in full on BuzzFeed.

D.R.: There were politics involved. What were the politics at that
point? What was the sense of conflict over this report?

A.G.S.: Well, if there’s one thing I learned as a journalist, it’s don’t
waste your time chasing leakers. Just move on to addressing the problems
that the leaks reveal.

D.R.: You’re the only one in political power who’s learned that lesson.

A.G.S.: I won’t get into that. But, look, it was a controversial
document at the time. I think it was read outside the building as, the
New York Times, with a lot of humility and reflection, trying to
understand what it wasn’t doing right as the world was changing around
it. And one of the theses was that, if we didn’t move fast, we were at
risk of being left behind. I know that there were people who were
unhappy with that notion. One of the things that makes an institution
like the New York Times, or The New Yorker, or the Washington
Post, successful, is these traditions that have been passed down
through generations, these really old-fashioned public-oriented notions
about service and about truth and about fairness. When journalists who
feel those things strongly see change, I think it’s inevitable to worry
that some of those special things could be at risk.

D.R.: Was the conflict along generational lines?

A.G.S.: Not exclusively, but it probably trended that way. But the leak
of it, I have to say, was the most productive thing that happened in the
evolution of the Times.

D.R.: Because it forced the conversation?

A.G.S.: It didn’t just force the conversation. There’s this phrase in
journalism—“show, don’t tell”—and I think leaders of news organizations
for many years had been telling people to change. You know, you have to
file faster, because the Web is fast; you have to go on social media,
because that’s where the conversation is; you have to change how you
tell stories, because we have all these new storytelling tools, and the
Internet is more visual. But we weren’t arming our colleagues with the
shared sense of reality. Where are we? What are the forces we’re facing?
And there were some really tough findings in there, and tough
statistics.

D.R.: What do you think was the toughest thing for people to bear,
statistically or just in terms of the facts of the matter?

A.G.S.: I think at the time it was really tough to realize that a whole
bunch of digital players, like the Huffington Post and BuzzFeed, had
rapidly eclipsed us and our journalism in reach.

D.R.: And that hurt the pride of people in the newsroom?

A.G.S.: I don't know if it’s pride. I’m not sure if people had fully
engaged with how dramatically the way that people were finding and
engaging with journalism had changed. You can only imagine how worried
you are that this very candid hundred-page internal document is now
being read simultaneously by the entire world, and with particular
interest by our competitors in media. But a Pulitzer Prize
winner—actually, a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner—David Barstow,
pulled me aside that day, and he had just read it. On paper, he would
seem like the type of old-fashioned journalist that may feel threatened
by a document like this. Instead, he pulled me aside and said, “I get it
now. I’ve been hearing all this stuff for years, but I needed to read
that. If I started over here, and you started over here, you brought me
ninety per cent of the way.”

D.R.: You’re now in your late thirties. At what point do you expect that
the print New York Times will be either completely gone or just
something that very special readers read in very tiny numbers.

A.G.S.: I’m always amazed at how often this question comes up.

D.R.: Do you care? Do you think it’s important at all?

A.G.S.: Well, I think it’s a testament to how much people love the print
New York Times, that this is this enduring concern. What I will say is
that we’ve got a million loyal readers, the paper is profitable every
day of the week, even without a single advertisement, and I expect it to
be around for a long time.

D.R.: But sooner or later—we all read the statistics, it’s fifteen per
cent [less print advertising] this year, fifteen per cent the next
year—does it matter to you in terms of the experience of reading the
Times? I’m now at the point where I read both, and a lot of the time I
have the sensation, when reading the [print] paper, is, oh, I read
this two days ago. And then I have the other frustration—maybe some
people agree, maybe you do, maybe you don’t—but that the one thing
reading on the phone doesn’t do as well is surface more things. It’s
very hard on a device that’s the size of an index card to surface as
many things as efficiently as turning the pages of a broadsheet
newspaper.

A.G.S.: For serendipity, and if you’re a completist—you know, you want
to have read everything—nothing beats print. But you look at the type of
storytelling we’re doing on the phone or on the desktop right now, or in
podcasts, and it is qualitatively better experiences that we’re
creating. Things that you could not do in ink and paper.

D.R.: I don’t want to speak for you, but essentially what you’re saying
is, when the advertising finally dribbles out, even more, it’ll be
completely atavistic. A print, broadsheet newspaper.

A.G.S.: I’m certainly not saying that, because, as I say, print is
profitable every day of the week without a single ad dollar.

D.R.: Despite the trucks, despite the ink and the printing and all the
costs.

A.G.S.: If we were just relying on the loyal readers who really care
about that tactile experience of leaning back on their couch and
unfolding the broadsheet, then we will keep printing. You know, the
reason I’m not predicting an end date, is that everyone who has tried to
predict an end date has been wrong. It’s proved to be a really enduring
thing. And it’s proved to be not incompatible with the phone. In fact,
we’ve found that many of our readers love reading us on the phone during
the work week, as they commute on the subway to work, and love nothing
more than not staring at a screen on the weekend and leaning back on the
couch and passing sections to the family.

D.R.: Donald Trump calls you the “failing” New York Times. But, at the
same time, your subscription numbers are way up; the level of journalism
is what it is. I used to hear things about how the [Sulzberger] family
wouldn’t be able to hold on to the paper anymore, because this is your
only business in a sense, there’s no tech company on the side that’s
providing billions of dollars. But I no longer hear as much about Mike
Bloomberg, or Laurene Jobs, or somebody plucking away the New York
Times. Do you feel more confident?

A.G.S.: I think that’s a testament to the progress that we’ve made. You
asked me about the innovation report. Four years later, our audience,
our subscriber base, and our digital revenue have all more than doubled.
We are now the most consumed news organization in the country.

D.R.: But it is expensive to do.

A.G.S.: It is expensive to do. This is the thing I say to my colleagues,
when I say it’s important for us to keep growing, I say, “Great
journalism is more expensive than people understand.” This is an
institution that gives reporters weeks, months, sometimes years to
report a single story. Last year—and this is one of the statistics I’m
proudest of—we put reporters on the ground in a hundred and seventy-four
countries. As you know, as a former foreign correspondent, it is so
important to actually immerse yourself in a place in order to understand
it. Increasingly, we’re seeing that people are recognizing that
original, deeply reported, rigorously fair, expert journalism is worth
paying for.

D.R.: Has Donald Trump helped you? Did you get a “Trump bump” like the
rest of us? How big was the Trump bump for the New York Times?

A.G.S.: Hundreds of thousands. Significant. But I think we started to
see this growth even before the election. We’ve seen it even after that
initial surge following Election Day. We’re seeing steady growth still.
I actually attribute it to a couple things. One, we’ve gotten much
better as a digital news organization. Our product, our journalism, is
drawing people in in a new way. Two, I think that we’re seeing a real
shift in people’s willingness to pay for services online—not just goods
but services—so I think that it’s not a coincidence that before the
election we were having our best subscription quarters at the same time
that Spotify and Netflix were having their best subscription quarters.
Three––and I think this is the tough one that I think all of us who care
about journalism and who care about this country should really be
worrying about—I think we’ve been seeing growth because the rest of the
media ecosystem has been getting so weak.

D.R.: You mean regional newspapers, and many other organizations that we
would normally depend on.

A.G.S.: That’s right. I talked about the struggles of even some of the
digital players. Over the last year, we’ve seen report after report of
layoffs even on the newer entrants that people had hoped would fill the
void left from the decline of local news.

D.R.: At the Washington Post, I’m reliably told, there’s a committee
studying what would happen, in business terms, at the Post if and when
Donald Trump is not the President of the United States. In other words,
if the Trump bump is reversible, will there be a slackening of audience
when the kind of anxiety level lowers? Do you worry about this? In a
saner time, would there be fewer readers of the New York Times?

A.G.S.: I think we are living at the intersection. Trump is
front-of-mind to many people. But Trump is actually part of a broader
and very important story, which is the rise of global populism. And that
broader story is one of three or four stories of our time that are
unfolding. Technology is remaking every aspect of how life is lived and
re-ordering our economy with breathtaking speed. Climate change is doing
the exact same thing, except it’s much less visible, and its
consequences are less clearly known, although they will be serious. The
fourth story is the story around race and gender that is growing in
volume, particularly since the Harvey Weinstein story that we broke.

D.R.: For many in the general public, the New York Times is seen as a
liberal newspaper. True or false?

A.G.S.: False. And I can send you all the hate mail that I’ve gotten
from our aggressive coverage of the Clinton campaign.

D.R.: O.K., but do you really think that it’s possible to argue that the
New York Times, by and large, isn’t both populated by people who are
left of center, and that the tone of the newspaper isn’t left of center?

A.G.S.: We’re committed to a really old-fashioned notion. It’s a notion
that isn’t too popular these days, which is reporting the news “without
fear or favor.” Those are words that my great-great-grandfather, Adolph
Ochs, wrote in our initial mission statement. What that means to me is
reporting on the world aggressively, searching for the truth wherever it
leads, and not putting our thumb on the scale. I really deeply admire my
colleagues’ commitment to that. We strive to understand every side of
the story, and to convey it fairly.

D.R.: Do you believe in the notion of objectivity?

A.G.S.: I do believe in the notion of objectivity. I think it’s
something you have to work at; I think it’s something that we don’t
always get right.

D.R.: I have a hard time with the notion of objectivity. Objectivity, to
me, sounds to me like what you do in a science lab. Fairness is another
matter. I struggle with that—the notion of objectivity. You think it’s
possible to accommodate it?

A.G.S.: You know, I think fairness is a word that comes pretty close to
me, too, if you want to call it fairness. The point is the discipline of
trying to strip away your own biases—whether they come from a worldview
or lived experience—and to try to tell a story in a way that’s fair to
all the participants in it. I think it’s a discipline. As I say, this
isn’t the most popular position right now. One of the first things we
did after the election was we hired a conservative columnist, Bret
Stephens, who had just won a Pulitzer Prize for the Wall Street
Journal.

D.R.: Were you concerned after his first column, about climate change,
blew up?

A.G.S.: If you look back at the history of conservative columnists at
the New York Times, you see this type of reaction each time someone
starts. It certainly happened when Bill Safire started.

D.R.: But that tells you what about the audience of the New York
Times?

A.G.S.: Well, what’s fascinating is that, when Bill Safire died, he was
mourned universally across our audience. What it tells me is that our
audience likes to be challenged. And already, we’re getting notes—and
I’m sure you can see on social media—of people being surprised to have
ideas, assumptions challenged even in our opinion pages. And certainly
we strive to do that every day in our news pages.

D.R.: Now you have a situation where the editor of the newspaper is Dean
Baquet, who is [sixty-one]. And you have a hard retirement age now for
the executive editor. You just hired a new editorial-page editor, James
Bennet came from TheAtlantic. Probably the biggest decision you
have to make in your position is who’s the next editor, and it seems to
the rest of the world as if Joe Kahn is in that position. Is that true?

A.G.S.: We’ve got the best editor in the business, Dean Baquet, and I
hope he is with us for a very long time. I always find it interesting
how the second there’s one succession decision—in this case, me stepping
into the publishing role—we immediately start gossiping about the next
one. I think we’re years away from looking at that.

D.R.: You just announced to your staff—and this was a big deal—that the
Times newsroom budget will remain stable for at least the next couple
of years. What gave you the confidence to make that announcement, and
what does it mean for the staff?

A.G.S.: Earlier, you asked, what is the value of family control in a
news organization like the Times? Because it can seem like an
old-fashioned notion. One of the things it allows you to do is to build
towards a longer time horizon. To make bets that pay off in decades or
even generations, rather than this quarter or this year. And, when I
look at all the decisions that my father, Arthur, made over the years,
the one that was the most important was never to cut back on the size or
ambition of our newsroom. Ultimately, that wasn’t just good for our
journalism; it was really good for our business. And it’s what’s left us
in such a strong position today. So I think that that reflects a
continued understanding that, at this particular moment, when the
newsroom is pursuing all these important stories all at once, that we
want to offer our colleagues there some sense of stability, even as the
world is going to continue to change rapidly.

D.R.: One thing has clearly changed—and it’s been an evolution, but it’s
clearly now the case, unless you tell me otherwise—and that is we used
to think of the New York Times as a New York newspaper. It was one of
any number of New York papers, and there were times when there were a
dozen or more. And now you’ve got, in terms of authoritative newspapers,
you’ve got the national, if not international, New York Times, the
national Washington Post, which is now gone from the Graham family to
Jeff Bezos. But, all around, when it comes to newspapers, you see
shrinkage. Do you feel a greater sense of responsibility now that you
are playing a bigger role than a generation ago to deal with, say,
malfeasance in Little Rock, Arkansas, or Dallas, Texas, or Sacramento,
California?

A.G.S.: I don’t think our country can rely on a single newspaper to fill
this void that’s been opening up around local journalism. It can’t and
it shouldn’t. It’s not healthy for our country. The New York Times,
particularly under Dean Baquet, who is a Pulitzer Prize-winning former
investigative reporter, has been deeply investing in the form of
investigative and accountability reporting all around the country. Over
the last year, we’ve hired a hundred new journalists, and hiring
investigative reporters from places like Miami and Milwaukee has been at
the top of that list. But I actually think that the service that the
Times can provide to the broader industry, more than any other, is to
find a path forward for quality, resource-intensive journalism, and to
lead the way on the business model.

D.R.: How have you felt about the change at the Washington Post? It’s
now owned by Jeff Bezos, who has essentially unlimited resources, which
is an extraordinary thing in any business. And it’s made a difference.
You now have what is, to my mind, a real, old-fashioned newspaper war
going on between the Post and the New York Times, particularly in
Washington.

A.G.S.: The numbers would say it’s a mobile-app war. How do I feel about
the growth at the Washington Post? It’s wonderful to see that
institution growing again.

D.R.: Is it good for you?

A.G.S.: It’s good for our country, first and foremost. After years of
shrinking—you were probably there at its height.

D.R.: Yes, but then I’d call my friends, and every afternoon they were
cutting another sheet cake to say goodbye to yet another person.

A.G.S.: And closing their foreign bureaus, and closing their national
bureaus. And it’s wonderful to see this institution—the country needs a
great newspaper in Washington growing again. And I think competition is
really healthy. I have a bunch of admiration, both for Marty Baron [the
editor of the Post] and for Jeff Bezos, for what they’ve done to that
place in just a couple years.

D.R.: You used to have, until very recently, a public editor, who was a
kind of in-house critic of whatever he or she wanted to critique. You’ve
decided to get rid of that. Why?

A.G.S.: It felt like a vestige of print. One of my jobs over the last
few jobs is to look at all the things that we’re doing that made total
sense in an era in which the news came once a day—or, if you were a
Sunday subscriber, once a week—and don’t make sense in a world in which
you don’t have a passive, removed audience, and you can respond
immediately to concerns that arise. And I think it felt like, in some
ways, we were dis-intermediating—we were putting an intermediary
around—accountability, and asking a single person to call us out if we
did something wrong. I actually think that there’s a much better model,
which is the reporters and the editors immediately stepping forward and
responding in the moment to readers, and saying, “This didn’t work.”
There’s a great example of this: we had a pretty lousy story, about a
year ago, about what would all the dads do in Montclair when all the
moms went to the Women’s March.

D.R.: Ouch.

A.G.S.: And it was just a bad story. In the old system, we would have
waited a week for the public editor to decide whether or not it was bad;
she would weigh in; the editor and reporter in question probably would
have crossed their fingers and hoped that she deem that it wasn’t bad,
even though all of social media has decided, no, this is a very bad
story. In this scenario, what actually happened was the Metro editor,
within hours, went public and said, “Hey, I really messed up here. This
was a really terrible story. Please don’t blame it on our reporter. It
was a bad assignment that he was given.” I think that that is a much
more responsive model that fits much better with the moment.

D.R.: Are you a big presence on Twitter and social media?

A.G.S.: I’m not a big presence on social media. I think if you opened up
my Twitter account you’d find two tweets from my Kansas City reporting
days.

D.R.: Why’d you back out?

A.G.S.: I’m not on social media. I’m a pretty private person. When I
initially signed up for Twitter, in the first few days, I discovered
that every media critic in America had decided to follow me in those
initial days. And reporting is enough of a high-wire act.

D.R.: And yet you say that all the conversation is there. We hear this
from all kinds of wise heads. I remember the late David Carr going on,
“If you’re not on Twitter, you’re not in the conversation.” And then
some of those same people have been slowly backing out of Twitter,
because they’re tired of the poisonous side of it. Is that why you don’t
jump back in?

A.G.S.: I haven’t felt like I needed to be on social media to do my job
effectively. I have felt I needed to understand social media to do my
job effectively. I’ve made myself a student of it. But I think that
that’s really the reason I’m not spending time on it.

D.R.: I’m giving you a very important opportunity here. I just saw the
new Steven Spielberg movie, “The Post.” And I hope this doesn’t hurt,
but this is about the Washington Post’s experience vis-a-vis the
Pentagon Papers. Now, the Times is given credit for breaking the
story, but I’m told that people at the New York Times are really
annoyed with this movie.

A.G.S.: I wouldn’t say really annoyed.

D.R.: No, I mean, super annoyed at this movie.

A.G.S.: I think we’re all looking forward to the next Watergate movie.
Focussing on the extraordinary reporting of the New York Times.

D.R.: Why is Times-level journalism under risk?

A.G.S.: Because it’s expensive. In fact, I think our pretty spectacular
growth in audience and subscribers is a testament that people actually
do want quality. I believe it’s the reason behind The New Yorker’s rapid growth as well. These are two organizations that are committed to
adding value with everything they do––to digging deep, to asking tough
questions. So I believe that the single most important challenge facing
folks like you and me is proving that there’s a path forward for that
type of journalism. And I’m really encouraged by the path we’re on right
now. I think there’s a secondary challenge that has more to do with this
moment in the life of the country, when our politics are so polarized,
when our media diets are so fragmented, when even the underlying notion
of truth is somehow in question. In that environment, I really do
believe that the New York Times can play a role in bringing people
together around a shared understanding of the truth.

D.R.: Maybe this is a rude question, and maybe it’s a private question,
but it’s an essential question to our discussion: The Wall Street
Journal finally got sold by the Bancroft family, to Rupert Murdoch, for
an ungodly sum, for five billion dollars, because the Bancroft familygot larger and larger—this is a historic dynamic we see in all kinds of
families—and less and less interested in the challenges of journalism.
They finally wanted the cash. We see you, and hear your commitment to
journalism, but the Sulzberger family is large, complicated, diverse,
[with] different opinions. Is there any guarantee against that kind of
fracturing of commitment so that it’s hard to maintain a hold on it?

A.G.S.: My family is unequivocally committed to this institution. In
fact, we feel like it’s the great privilege of our lives to be in
service of an institution that is so important to this country. I
actually think that the smoothness of this publisher transition that
you’ve just witnessed is actually a testament to how unified we are.
I’ve got five other cousins who work at the New York Times, but I’m
always particularly struck by how deep the commitment is of my aunts and
uncles and cousins who’ve never spent a day working at the Times. They
feel it just as strongly as we do.

D.R.: So even when times get tough, and dividends might disappear, the
commitment is to the end?

A.G.S.: I think you have your test case. Times were tough for much of
the past decade, and the family didn’t just hold strong, we got
stronger. And we’re deeply committed to the Times for the future.
We’re building something for generations.

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